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Post by custardboy on Sept 22, 2017 14:31:15 GMT
Out of colossals and gargantuans, yeah generally. Battle engines are good on the hordes side though. Well, CiD will hopefully allow the Dracodile to not be boring at least.
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Post by danfromchicago on Sept 22, 2017 15:12:54 GMT
After a bit more math: The melee potential does not make me enthused. Against Arm 19 a base Dracodile does 55.5 damage. A Raged Wrastler does 53.5. (Including a free charge on both, adding in assult bumps that to a whole 4 pts difference.) It is literally the same issue the Mountain King and Mauler had before they gave the King Rage as an animus. Once you bring a Wrastler to buff the Dracodile, you might as well leave the Dracodile at home. And every other buff applies to both equally, so the Dracodile will always cost double and do a tiny bit extra damage. It'll get taken every now and then because the animus is intriguing and colossals have other benefits, but purely by the melee numbers it is too costly for what you get. Assumptions: The Dracodile is MAT 6, RAT 5 The Target is DEF 10 ARM 19 Expected Damage for the Dracodile(6 Bites, 1 boosted claw + 1 unboosted claw, 1 spray) is 38.5 + 12.375 + 1.891 = 52.77 (some rounding applied) Expected Damage for the Wrastler(5 Bites, 1 boosted claw + 1 unboosted claw) = 36.667 + 12.375 = just over 49 Definitely true that they are pretty close. So the question then is what the Dracodile brings and what can't it do. It doesn't enable increasing the damage on another beast. That's the Wrastler all day. What it does is enable the delivery of itself and of other models. Against shooting, mass concealment is less than awful. Against melee troops, pathfinder is certainly helpful. I think though that it is important to note that the Wrastler has to be buffed. Either by the caster or by another Wrastler. The Dracodile can just activate and go. So, how many boxes does the Dracodile have? That's a very relevant question.
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Post by Gaston on Sept 22, 2017 15:31:41 GMT
Assumptions: The Dracodile is MAT 6, RAT 5 The Target is DEF 10 ARM 19 Expected Damage for the Dracodile(6 Bites, 1 boosted claw + 1 unboosted claw, 1 spray) is 38.5 + 12.375 + 1.891 = 52.77 (some rounding applied) Expected Damage for the Wrastler(5 Bites, 1 boosted claw + 1 unboosted claw) = 36.667 + 12.375 = just over 49 Definitely true that they are pretty close. So the question then is what the Dracodile brings and what can't it do. It doesn't enable increasing the damage on another beast. That's the Wrastler all day. What it does is enable the delivery of itself and of other models. Against shooting, mass concealment is less than awful. Against melee troops, pathfinder is certainly helpful. I think though that it is important to note that the Wrastler has to be buffed. Either by the caster or by another Wrastler. The Dracodile can just activate and go. So, how many boxes does the Dracodile have? That's a very relevant question. Math question: why are you boosting the claws and not the bite? I think the most health of any colossal is the Hyperion and Judicator chassis at 60, the rest check in at 56 or so? The large number of concentrated boxes is probably my number one most desired thing for it. Particularly with a caster like Maelok, a +4 Arm swing on something with a ton of boxes is huge. I have done it a lot with Durst and Judis and it was incredibly hard for opponents to handle. I particularly am keen on him with just a Blindwalker/Draco battle group to start. Then either Posse spam or dual Croaks. But that is also why I want the output of the Draco pushed a bit further; I want it to be able to roam free, untethered by raging Wrastler babies. Against shooting, mass concealment is less than awful, but Posse already come with it built in. So it'll impact the beasts easily, and applying it to screening units may prove more challenging in the positioning game. Unfortunately though, generally the gunlines I have run into are not struggling with accuracy (looking at you Sloan, Caine3, TEP). The pathfinder is also a situational bonus, if the model has reach they effectively lose 1.5" off the charge range. So it gets you a little bit of cushion for your gargantuan, but not much for anything in front of it. One thing I do plan and position a lot around however, is preventing multi-charges on my huge bases, so anything that helps is something I will leverage. All that pouty being said, I do think that the animus is very interesting and clever, and don't want to take away from that at all.
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Post by danfromchicago on Sept 22, 2017 15:47:26 GMT
Early in my warmachine life I was taught to boost the lowest POW attacks likely to do damage. In this case, stats says it doesn't matter; boost the bite, boost the claw, the numbers turn out the same. It may be true for most or even all cases, dunno.
And how does a 2" melee model only lose 1.5" of range? A SPD 6 model with 2" of melee range needs to start <= 8 inches vs 11. That's 3 not 1.5.
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Post by Gaston on Sept 22, 2017 15:59:33 GMT
You are correct, bad mental math on my part.
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Post by huckebein on Sept 22, 2017 17:01:58 GMT
Early in my warmachine life I was taught to boost the lowest POW attacks likely to do damage. In this case, stats says it doesn't matter; boost the bite, boost the claw, the numbers turn out the same. It may be true for most or even all cases, dunno. And how does a 2" melee model only lose 1.5" of range? A SPD 6 model with 2" of melee range needs to start <= 8 inches vs 11. That's 3 not 1.5. The problem is that the only thing the dracodile seems to do is 'cut off 3" of charge distance, not be shootable with Barny,' with the tradeoff that it's not particularly scary as far as anything that it is doing itself if the enemy is willing to just let it kill something to pull it into range of the rest of the army. The only thing interesting about the dracodile is the animus, and only because it eats threat ranges directly to the dracodile and your warlock. Skorne actually takes advantage of that just fine, which makes me wonder why people were saying it doesn't do anything for them. It does the same things for skorne that it does for minions, it just gets the tradeoff of skorne can also put it under force aura and has beast handlers for it to buff its power separate from the warlock without having to bring another heavy.
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Post by danfromchicago on Sept 22, 2017 17:22:46 GMT
Excellent. I trust your participation in the CID process will provide evidence to robustly demonstrate the validity of your hypothesis and that the model can then be improved
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